Directing

Mark Donskoy

Born March 6, 1901 · Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Ukraine]

Died March 20, 1981 · aged 80

Mark Semyonovich Donskoy (6 March [O.S. 21 February] 1901 – 21 March 1981) was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, and studio administrative head. Donskoy was born in Odessa in a Jewish family. During the Civil War, he served in the Red Army (1921-1923), and was held captive by the White Russians for ten months. After he was freed, he was discharged from military service. He studied psychology …

Known For

His Excellency

His Excellency · 1928

This 1928 film features stylized cinematography and actors from the Moscow Art Theater in a fiction story based on the life of Jewish Labor Bund member Hirsch Lekert who attempted to assassinate the Vilna governor in 1902 to avenge the flogging of workers who participated in a May Day rally.

A Mother's Heart

A Mother's Heart · 1966

A Mother's Heart

Family drama centering on the childhood of Vladimir Lenin, then Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, in the city of Simbirsk, and his relationship with his mother.

In the Big City

In the Big City · 1927

In the Big City

Two country boys move to Moscow. One becomes a construction worker who dreams of being an inventor, the other becomes a decadent poet.

Foma Gordeyev

Foma Gordeyev · 1959

Foma Gordeyev, the son of a wealthy Volga merchant, doesn't want to continue his father's work. The mind is sickened by the dirt and injustice of life around him. Foma is seeking solace in a drunken rampage and wild antics. After many years of desolation, he is half-ill at the opening of a night shelter built with his father’s money.

Mother

Timid old woman Pelageya Nilovna observes the revolutionary activities of her son Pavel Vlasov and gradually comes to realize that his cause is a great and noble one. She involves herself in the movement and finds joy and great courage in her new life as a revolutionary.

Prostitute

Prostitute · 1927

A bold study on the dangers of prostitution in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It's sort of dramatic fiction that tells the story of Lyuba, which after irremediable events, loses his honor, being obliged to exercise the oldest profession in the world to survive. She hopes for better days and a new opportunity. The film also shows us the story of two other women who also need hope.

The Romantics

The Romantics · 1941

Set in the high North, this tale of a Russian teacher who begins to educate the children of the Chukchi tribe reinforces the director's firm belief in the power of education to overcome distrust and establish a shared civilizational foundation for all human beings.

Mother's Loyalty

Mother's Loyalty · 1966

Mother's Loyalty

MovieDramaHistory

The film covers the period from 1900 to 1917. Historical events—the Russo-Japanese War, January 9, and others—are shown through the eyes of a mother who begins to realize that her children have many like-minded followers, and thanks to this, she comes to believe in the feasibility of the ideals for which her eldest son sacrificed himself. Only the awareness that his cause is not hopeless, that it is achievable and close to victory, gives her the courage to endure separation from her loved ones and wandering.

Filmography

Sort

His Excellency

His Excellency · 1928

This 1928 film features stylized cinematography and actors from the Moscow Art Theater in a fiction story based on the life of Jewish Labor Bund member Hirsch Lekert who attempted to assassinate the Vilna governor in 1902 to avenge the flogging of workers who participated in a May Day rally.

Editor

A Mother's Heart

A Mother's Heart · 1966

A Mother's Heart

Family drama centering on the childhood of Vladimir Lenin, then Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, in the city of Simbirsk, and his relationship with his mother.

Director

In the Big City

In the Big City · 1927

In the Big City

Two country boys move to Moscow. One becomes a construction worker who dreams of being an inventor, the other becomes a decadent poet.

Director

Foma Gordeyev

Foma Gordeyev · 1959

Foma Gordeyev, the son of a wealthy Volga merchant, doesn't want to continue his father's work. The mind is sickened by the dirt and injustice of life around him. Foma is seeking solace in a drunken rampage and wild antics. After many years of desolation, he is half-ill at the opening of a night shelter built with his father’s money.

Director

Mother

Timid old woman Pelageya Nilovna observes the revolutionary activities of her son Pavel Vlasov and gradually comes to realize that his cause is a great and noble one. She involves herself in the movement and finds joy and great courage in her new life as a revolutionary.

Director

Prostitute

Prostitute · 1927

A bold study on the dangers of prostitution in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It's sort of dramatic fiction that tells the story of Lyuba, which after irremediable events, loses his honor, being obliged to exercise the oldest profession in the world to survive. She hopes for better days and a new opportunity. The film also shows us the story of two other women who also need hope.

Passerby

The Romantics

The Romantics · 1941

Set in the high North, this tale of a Russian teacher who begins to educate the children of the Chukchi tribe reinforces the director's firm belief in the power of education to overcome distrust and establish a shared civilizational foundation for all human beings.

Director

Mother's Loyalty

Mother's Loyalty · 1966

Mother's Loyalty

MovieDramaHistory

The film covers the period from 1900 to 1917. Historical events—the Russo-Japanese War, January 9, and others—are shown through the eyes of a mother who begins to realize that her children have many like-minded followers, and thanks to this, she comes to believe in the feasibility of the ideals for which her eldest son sacrificed himself. Only the awareness that his cause is not hopeless, that it is achievable and close to victory, gives her the courage to endure separation from her loved ones and wandering.

Director

The Village Teacher

The Village Teacher · 1947

The Village Teacher

A life-long story of a romantic school teacher who left imperial St. Petersburg for teaching country children. Driven by noble intentions to enlighten people and examples by 1880s revolutionary "People's Will" member teachers, a young woman spent her life in a village and evidenced the changes a Russian village has undergone from pre-revolutionary tsarist times to late 1940s.

Director

Price of a Man

Price of a Man · 1929

Director

The Orlovs

The Orlovs · 1978

MovieDramaHistory

The drunkard and his wife become orderlies in a cholera barracks during the outbreak.

Director

Alitet Leaves for the Hills

Alitet Leaves for the Hills · 1949

Alitet Leaves for the Hills

The inhabitants of Chukotka are shown to be cruelly exploited before the revolution. Once Chukotka is visited by the representative of the Kamchatka Revolutionary Committee, Los, and the ethnographer Zhukov. The news of the arrival of the Russians immediately disperses along the coast. Contrary to the pressure of the American Thomson and the local "oligarch" Alitet in Chukotka, fair trade laws are established, as a result of which the Americans and Alitet leave Chukotka.

Director

The Horse That Cried

The Horse That Cried · 1957

The Horse That Cried

An adaptation of a story by a Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky that anticipates the Ukrainian "poetic cinema" of the '60s in its focus on star-crossed lovers and its celebration of nature. Set in the 1830s, the film follows two lovers on the run - a girl forced into marriage and her boyfriend, a serf who's being sought by the authorities - as they try to make their way to freedom.

Director

My Universities

My Universities · 1940

My Universities

My Universities is the last installment of Russian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Having endured a painful youth in My Childhood and a torturous sojourn as a serf in My Apprenticeship, future writer Gorki reaches maturity with an insatiable desire for personal and artistic freedom. Gorky goes to work in the shipyards and commisserates with the hard-drinking, philosophical dockworkers.

Director

How the Steel Was Tempered

How the Steel Was Tempered · 1942

How the Steel Was Tempered

This literary adaptation was one of only two films made during World War II on the subject of the Civil War following the Bolshevik Revolution, as attention by filmmakers and viewers shifted away from past history and toward the current conflict.

Screenplay

Fighting Film Collection No. 9

Fighting Film Collection No. 9 · 1942

Fighting Film Collection No. 9

Fighting Film Collection No. 9 (Boyevoy kinosbornik No. 9) is the ninth issue of Boyevoy kinosbornik series, released in May 1942. It contains three segments: "Kvartal No.14/Block 14" (Savchenko), "Siniye skaly/The Blue Cliff" (or "Blue Crags") (Braun) and "Mayak/The Signal" (or "Beacon") (Donskoy).

Director

Hello, Children!

Hello, Children! · 1962

Hello, Children!

MovieDramaFamily

A sad story about a little Japanese girl fighting heavy decease in a Russian summer camp on the Black Sea coast.

Director

Nadezhda

Nadezhda · 1973

The film tells about the childhood and youth of the wife, friend and military ally of the founder of the country of the Soviets Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. The main attention in the film is paid to the participation of a young revolutionary in the organization of the struggle of the workers of St. Petersburg for their rights, against the autocracy.

Director

Brother of a Hero

Brother of a Hero · 1940

Brother of a Hero

Producer

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky · 1938

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky

Young Maxim grows up under the czarist regime with his grandparents as guardians. Continually demeaned by his martinet grandfather, Maxim is drawn to his warm-hearted grandmother, who instills in him the willingness to pursue his writing muse.

Director

Song of Happiness

Song of Happiness · 1934

Song of Happiness

A coming-of-age story about a flute-playing boy (Yyvan Kyrla) from the Mari people, a national minority who lived near the Volga, and how he is educated by the Soviet state.

Director

The Taras Family

The Taras Family · 1945

The Taras Family

A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kyiv. The drama focusses on the travails of a typical Soviet family and on the efforts by the Germans to force the reopening of a local munitions factory.

Director

My Apprenticeship

My Apprenticeship · 1939

My Apprenticeship

Picking up where 1938's My Childhood left off, the story covers the years in Gorki's life when the future writer was on his own, looking for a purpose and place in life.

Director

Rainbow

Rainbow · 1944

The German conquerors are above nothing, not even the slaughter of small children, to break the spirit of their Soviet captives. Suffering more than most is Olena, a Soviet partisan who returns to the village to bear her child, only to endure the cruelest of arbitrary tortures at the hands of the Nazis.

Director